Various order packing methods and systems are currently used in a packaging industry worldwide. Plants and other manufacturing and assembly facilities manually build mixed pallets of multiple SKU's. This practice results in high labor cost, large floor space, increase of quantity issues, such as damaged products, order accuracy, low pallet density, thereby resulting in an unstable load. It is known to provide methods and apparatuses for stacking individual packages into one or more groups, in order that the groups of packages may be commonly transported to a remote location, such as, for example, distributions centers, supermarkets, gas stations, and the like.
The prior art systems and methods do not provide great flexibility and do not readily accommodate different sized packages on a pallet. Moreover, with conventional method and systems, it is difficult to customize orders. The prior art apparatuses, currently used in various plants, typically add cases to pallets by stacking additional cases directly on top of the cases already placed on the pallet, which results columns, spaced from one another, rather than layers of interlocking cases, which are unstable and easily collapsible during transportation to the remote location or between various location and will lead to significant problems associated with safety, material handling system efficiency, significant increases with respect to product delivery time and cost.
The prior art is replete with various devices and methods for handling workpieces, such as, for example, devices taught by the U.S. Pat. No. 7,184,855 to Stingel, III et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,210,894 to Huang, et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 7,210,280 to Cottone et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 7,221,998 to Brust et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,175,692 to Mazouz. The U.S. Pat. No. 7,221,998 to Brust et al., for example, teaches a method of building pallets of cases within an automated material handling system wherein the cases are arranged and ordered for placement in a case by case fashion by a robot. The method determines pallet layers to be placed on the pallet and identifies cases for inclusion in the pallet. Using the case dimension information, the cases are classified into at least one group, wherein each group is defined by a height range such that cases classified within a group have a height within the height range associated with that group. The cases of one of the groups can be assigned to locations within a same pallet layer, wherein the pallet layer has an area within a predefined area range. This method is time consuming and do not improve flexibility and speed needed in modern palletizing applications.
The U.S. Pat. No. 5,175,692 to Mazouz, for example, teaches a method and apparatus for randomly arriving mixed size and content parcels where a circular “carousel”-type conveyor is used to accept packages and stacks them upon pallets. The method and apparatus use “voxels”, which are of “unit length” to measure the parcels. The “largest common voxel” is determined for modeling purposes. This method is time consuming and do not improve flexibility and speed needed in modern palletizing applications.
There is a constant need in the area of a material handling art for an improved method and an automated system, which will randomly mixed containers of various kinds on a pallet in response to an individual order received from a customer.
There is also a constant need for an improved system and a method, which results in higher density as the containers are places on the pallet thereby creating a stable pallet.
Another constant need in the area of a material handling art is in improved methods and systems that is cost effective thereby providing perfect accuracy in identifying the condition of the containers, which results in elimination of returned goods located in the containers.
Although the aforementioned prior art patents present certain advantages over the manual palletizing, needs always exist for improvements over the prior art which provide improved accuracy and efficiency of pallet stacking, which is provided by the present invention. As such, the present invention is directed to solve one or more problems associated with the prior art systems and methods.